The real immediate danger (beyond security) seems to be incumbent distortion of markets and monopolistic behavior, and resultant cronyism and regulatory capture. Proposals like this "letter" are far more likely to exacerbate such issues than to help. Rather than "do something" vs. "do nothing," let's try to build frameworks for appropriately applying existing legal principles to this new world. At this point, "watch, analyze, and do very little" seems right.
Also treat them like a regular corporation. If a corporation trains employees to hack into systems and has them try to hack into systems and you can contact them to ask one of their employees to hack for you- what happens to that company (outside of a white hat security outfit)?
The initial version likely revealed the agenda of the groups pushing this. The signatures are just to lend their efforts credibility.
This sounds like an effort to get a few friendly “experts” to testify before Congress and endorse some of their brilliant ideas (no data centers!)
If an economist (or whomever) has some good ideas and recommendations or has done some actual analysis, shouldn’t they present these? That would at least move the debate forward.
The policies have already been written by some group and given to a few members of Congress. All they are waiting for is to a shell a few “experts” in for congressional testimony to submit the bill.
Then our elected reps not only get cash from the activists pushing the policies but also cash from tech companies buying protection money and lobbying against them.
If the concern is employment loss, then the policy implication is to facilitate re-allocation of labor from activities where labor is being displaced to other activities. Otherwise, the only way to avoid loss is for wages to fall in the labor dispacing activities. This can happen at all levels from the individual, firm, or economic sector. YIMBY-ism/Abundance is policy to make AI complimentary at the macro level.
Yeah, I can't wait for the retrospective post Noah makes in a few years about what came of this.
---------------------------
AI is a serious advancement. It feels different bc it IS different. Analysts are missing how different it is.
Human technology is built from a bunch of parts that each has to be designed to work together to achieve some task. As the task gets harder (jetliner vs skateboard) the parts are assembled into hierarchical modules, but each module needs to perform its sub-task, and has well defined performance specs and inputs and outputs, and nowadays, its own embedded linear programming firmware. And critical failure paths.
Biology works differently. It is FAR MORE complex and hierarchical than human technology (in terms of the number and types of parts involved), and their specifications and what each part does often appears unclear, random, and/or redundant. And the system is highly robust to removing individual parts or even types of parts. And it was not designed with attention to each piece, it emerged as the result of a long and costly optimization process just to perform an overall task (called natural selection).
LLMs and other deep learning products are the FIIRST commercial human technologies that work from scratch the way biology works: emergent, complex, fuzzy, overparameterized. And they are the result of long and costly optimization processes to perform various tasks.
These deep learning algos are the first of a new _branch_ of human technology that is fundamentally different and more capable than all earlier human technology. One that works the way biology works. Not biomimetic. But embodying biology's secret design sauce!
But AI is just software. It can only perform 'information' tasks. Whereas learning optimization is a design approach. Biology shows us that deep learning can be used to create highly capable and robust materials, devices and autonomous systems embodied in the real world, that can perform very complex real world tasks. That is 'deep learning hardware'.
In a couple (human) generations, our technology hardware will be largely unrecognizable to us. The way it is designed and manufactured will be alien. It will not be designed... it will be optimized (or imagined) on large scale AI platforms. It will be printed/grown with a massive amount of embedded information and part density. And it will be performant and robust it ways that will supercede biology, while looking (to us) uncannily biological.
"This is despite the fact that lots of people in the AI industry think their inventions are going to destroy jobs."
As a rule, businessmen do not know anything special about macroeconomics and no one shoud pay much attention to them. And techies have a recent history of getting it spectaculrly wrong by supporting Trump's low immigrtion, high deficits, trade restriction anti-growth agenda.
Thank goodness for macro- we can at least annotate consistently inaccurate predictions with math. 😊. They can’t predict the economy accurately (or the impact of a policy like “stimulus”) and we are going to ask them about technology?
An iterative approach (which is how businesses operate) is better than a fixed policy idea one becomes wedded to.
For iteration to work, though, there needs to be accountability and measurement of outcomes (something econ can do). Unfortunately, government doesn’t do accountability and sticks with lots of bad ideas that don’t work,
I tend to be in the camp of AI will take jobs away eventually (when it's good enough), and also hoping that it does. Because I'd love to move towards a post-scarcity civilization that we don't *have* to work in, just if we want to. -- I want the robots and AIs to do all the work, and then we do whatever the hell we want
After retirement my father spent a decade tutoring math for the children of millionaires. It was a great gig for him, and helped several kids ace the SAT and get into Harvard and Stanford.
Sadly, the economy does not allow this type of gig to scale. Abundance might allow for every smart kid to have a private math tutor! A million new soccer coaches! Guitar lessons for all!
Public art, resurgence of community theatre, universal organic neighborhood gardens! My daughter would love to dedicate her life to supporting communies of rabbit lovers, but she's busy working 50+ hours each week at a bullshit job that pays enough to pay rent.
There are infinite meaningful endeavors that are economically infeasible at scale because of high labor demand for bullshit jobs. Abundance changes the equation.
Post-scarcity meaning energy, food, housing abundance - think utopia where everyone has all basic needs met because we as humanity can easily provide them.
On the whatever we want looking like a job, yeah probably, or like taking hobbies very seriously, or whatever. I think humans like structure, routine, meaning, and community - but we don't need a job per se and we can get all that from other things that may look job-like.
An AI that compliments workers. How many workers will we have?
In our attempt to protect workers from AI job loss we should know what our worker population will be.
So, I asked ChatGPT, with our current birth rate vs. the needed replacement birth rate, what our population loss is. With and without Immigration. Below is the answer.
A simple "no immigration" model
Let's assume: Fertility remains at 1.6. Immigration falls essentially to zero
Life expectancy remains roughly at today's level
A generation is about 30 years. Each generation would be: 1.6 / 2.1 = 76% the size of the previous one.
That means:
Using today's population of roughly 342 million:
After 30 years: about 260 million
After 50 years: about 220–240 million, depending on mortality assumptions.
That represents an average decline of roughly 0.7–1.0% per year once the decline begins.
However, Chat said he doesn’t believe that will happen LOL. It hasn’t met the US voter yet.
Given our rate of immigration and if the birth rate stays at 1.6, our current population will stay about the same 50 years from now.
The Congressional Budget Office projects: population growth slows steadily,
growth reaches roughly zero around 2056.
So how many workers and how much immigration? We might prefer less immigration if there are fewer jobs. We might be far more restrictive, and that may be the right policy if we have a bunch of AGI humanoid robots. Having an unemployed workforce getting a basic minimum income for expenses doesn’t thrill me.
In the end, the question remains: what does AGI mean for humans, and what does it mean for work in the age of robots? My thoughtful answer is we have no clue at the moment.
Agree! "Mandarins in a room" are so unreliable. They claim smoking causes lung cancer, but look at that quite healthy Marlboro Man. Ozone layer, can you even see it? Expertise is so over-rated that we should all just ignore the experts. There are so many other ways to make sound policy decisions. So-called experts say automation has reduced manufacturing employment, simply by comparing headcounts to constant-value dollar US mfg output; such nonsense. Next they'll assert, without historical proof, that self-driving trucks will impact driver employment. It's obvious we should just wait & see what happens. Prior planning always causes piss poor performance.
I agree with you, Noah. But Daron is a good person as well as a a good economist. Why does he sign something so open-ended when he knows (or should know) that lesser lights would dominate the eventual "do something" space?
I signed. My reading of the statement didn't put so much weight on the precise use of "steer" and the Acemoglu connection. I read it as "hey there are big opportunities and big risks here; economists need to be working on this, thinking about this, and coming up with some policy designs."
Let me provide a banal example rather than an AI 2040-style example so that folks don't get too fired up. Existing academic institutions like peer review and grant applications are facing a very large shock from AI in the next couple of years. These institutions are imperfect but they are intended to serve certain goals. The incoming shock is large enough that we need to model this and we need to start experimenting with alternative institutional arrangements, if only on a small scale. The time to work on this is before the system breaks down, not after. Maybe the system won't break down and we will look silly for worrying, but I wouldn't put my money on that.
See what happens then regulate the downside is the 'scientific' approach. But perhaps this is an example of campaigning in poetry. So more of a political intervention, saying we're watching and are prepared to act if business does harmful stuff which it (and its lobbyists) then claim can't be undone, is a step backwards, an encroachment on freedom, not in the best interests of the country etc etc. 'We must act proportionally and at the appropriate time' doesn't grab the attention in quite the same way.
If Noah were running for office, then I would agree that refusing to sign a statement of this kind would be a bad call. Sadly, he in not running for office, though.
The real immediate danger (beyond security) seems to be incumbent distortion of markets and monopolistic behavior, and resultant cronyism and regulatory capture. Proposals like this "letter" are far more likely to exacerbate such issues than to help. Rather than "do something" vs. "do nothing," let's try to build frameworks for appropriately applying existing legal principles to this new world. At this point, "watch, analyze, and do very little" seems right.
Copyright law and data privacy would be a start
Also treat them like a regular corporation. If a corporation trains employees to hack into systems and has them try to hack into systems and you can contact them to ask one of their employees to hack for you- what happens to that company (outside of a white hat security outfit)?
Good decision.
The initial version likely revealed the agenda of the groups pushing this. The signatures are just to lend their efforts credibility.
This sounds like an effort to get a few friendly “experts” to testify before Congress and endorse some of their brilliant ideas (no data centers!)
If an economist (or whomever) has some good ideas and recommendations or has done some actual analysis, shouldn’t they present these? That would at least move the debate forward.
At this stage, shouldn’t an “act now” statement focus on proposing a process for developing policies rather than policies themselves?
The policies have already been written by some group and given to a few members of Congress. All they are waiting for is to a shell a few “experts” in for congressional testimony to submit the bill.
Then our elected reps not only get cash from the activists pushing the policies but also cash from tech companies buying protection money and lobbying against them.
This is the way the system works.
If the concern is employment loss, then the policy implication is to facilitate re-allocation of labor from activities where labor is being displaced to other activities. Otherwise, the only way to avoid loss is for wages to fall in the labor dispacing activities. This can happen at all levels from the individual, firm, or economic sector. YIMBY-ism/Abundance is policy to make AI complimentary at the macro level.
Don't just do something, stand there!
Yeah, I can't wait for the retrospective post Noah makes in a few years about what came of this.
---------------------------
AI is a serious advancement. It feels different bc it IS different. Analysts are missing how different it is.
Human technology is built from a bunch of parts that each has to be designed to work together to achieve some task. As the task gets harder (jetliner vs skateboard) the parts are assembled into hierarchical modules, but each module needs to perform its sub-task, and has well defined performance specs and inputs and outputs, and nowadays, its own embedded linear programming firmware. And critical failure paths.
Biology works differently. It is FAR MORE complex and hierarchical than human technology (in terms of the number and types of parts involved), and their specifications and what each part does often appears unclear, random, and/or redundant. And the system is highly robust to removing individual parts or even types of parts. And it was not designed with attention to each piece, it emerged as the result of a long and costly optimization process just to perform an overall task (called natural selection).
LLMs and other deep learning products are the FIIRST commercial human technologies that work from scratch the way biology works: emergent, complex, fuzzy, overparameterized. And they are the result of long and costly optimization processes to perform various tasks.
These deep learning algos are the first of a new _branch_ of human technology that is fundamentally different and more capable than all earlier human technology. One that works the way biology works. Not biomimetic. But embodying biology's secret design sauce!
But AI is just software. It can only perform 'information' tasks. Whereas learning optimization is a design approach. Biology shows us that deep learning can be used to create highly capable and robust materials, devices and autonomous systems embodied in the real world, that can perform very complex real world tasks. That is 'deep learning hardware'.
In a couple (human) generations, our technology hardware will be largely unrecognizable to us. The way it is designed and manufactured will be alien. It will not be designed... it will be optimized (or imagined) on large scale AI platforms. It will be printed/grown with a massive amount of embedded information and part density. And it will be performant and robust it ways that will supercede biology, while looking (to us) uncannily biological.
"This is despite the fact that lots of people in the AI industry think their inventions are going to destroy jobs."
As a rule, businessmen do not know anything special about macroeconomics and no one shoud pay much attention to them. And techies have a recent history of getting it spectaculrly wrong by supporting Trump's low immigrtion, high deficits, trade restriction anti-growth agenda.
Thank goodness for macro- we can at least annotate consistently inaccurate predictions with math. 😊. They can’t predict the economy accurately (or the impact of a policy like “stimulus”) and we are going to ask them about technology?
An iterative approach (which is how businesses operate) is better than a fixed policy idea one becomes wedded to.
For iteration to work, though, there needs to be accountability and measurement of outcomes (something econ can do). Unfortunately, government doesn’t do accountability and sticks with lots of bad ideas that don’t work,
I tend to be in the camp of AI will take jobs away eventually (when it's good enough), and also hoping that it does. Because I'd love to move towards a post-scarcity civilization that we don't *have* to work in, just if we want to. -- I want the robots and AIs to do all the work, and then we do whatever the hell we want
But "whatever we want" will probably still look like a job. [What could "post scarcity" mean?]
After retirement my father spent a decade tutoring math for the children of millionaires. It was a great gig for him, and helped several kids ace the SAT and get into Harvard and Stanford.
Sadly, the economy does not allow this type of gig to scale. Abundance might allow for every smart kid to have a private math tutor! A million new soccer coaches! Guitar lessons for all!
Public art, resurgence of community theatre, universal organic neighborhood gardens! My daughter would love to dedicate her life to supporting communies of rabbit lovers, but she's busy working 50+ hours each week at a bullshit job that pays enough to pay rent.
There are infinite meaningful endeavors that are economically infeasible at scale because of high labor demand for bullshit jobs. Abundance changes the equation.
Post-scarcity meaning energy, food, housing abundance - think utopia where everyone has all basic needs met because we as humanity can easily provide them.
On the whatever we want looking like a job, yeah probably, or like taking hobbies very seriously, or whatever. I think humans like structure, routine, meaning, and community - but we don't need a job per se and we can get all that from other things that may look job-like.
Right on Noah!!! Let’s see what “it” is before we regulate it!!
This type of intellectual hubris does nobody no good. It’s holding back Europe and leading the democratic socialists to lord knows where.
But once we figure out what “it” is and what downsides it brings about then we can have a good discussion of what fixes it needs.
The "fixes" are likely to be things we should already be doing.
An AI that compliments workers. How many workers will we have?
In our attempt to protect workers from AI job loss we should know what our worker population will be.
So, I asked ChatGPT, with our current birth rate vs. the needed replacement birth rate, what our population loss is. With and without Immigration. Below is the answer.
A simple "no immigration" model
Let's assume: Fertility remains at 1.6. Immigration falls essentially to zero
Life expectancy remains roughly at today's level
A generation is about 30 years. Each generation would be: 1.6 / 2.1 = 76% the size of the previous one.
That means:
Using today's population of roughly 342 million:
After 30 years: about 260 million
After 50 years: about 220–240 million, depending on mortality assumptions.
That represents an average decline of roughly 0.7–1.0% per year once the decline begins.
However, Chat said he doesn’t believe that will happen LOL. It hasn’t met the US voter yet.
Given our rate of immigration and if the birth rate stays at 1.6, our current population will stay about the same 50 years from now.
The Congressional Budget Office projects: population growth slows steadily,
growth reaches roughly zero around 2056.
So how many workers and how much immigration? We might prefer less immigration if there are fewer jobs. We might be far more restrictive, and that may be the right policy if we have a bunch of AGI humanoid robots. Having an unemployed workforce getting a basic minimum income for expenses doesn’t thrill me.
In the end, the question remains: what does AGI mean for humans, and what does it mean for work in the age of robots? My thoughtful answer is we have no clue at the moment.
Agree! "Mandarins in a room" are so unreliable. They claim smoking causes lung cancer, but look at that quite healthy Marlboro Man. Ozone layer, can you even see it? Expertise is so over-rated that we should all just ignore the experts. There are so many other ways to make sound policy decisions. So-called experts say automation has reduced manufacturing employment, simply by comparing headcounts to constant-value dollar US mfg output; such nonsense. Next they'll assert, without historical proof, that self-driving trucks will impact driver employment. It's obvious we should just wait & see what happens. Prior planning always causes piss poor performance.
I agree with you, Noah. But Daron is a good person as well as a a good economist. Why does he sign something so open-ended when he knows (or should know) that lesser lights would dominate the eventual "do something" space?
Publicity and brand management?
I signed. My reading of the statement didn't put so much weight on the precise use of "steer" and the Acemoglu connection. I read it as "hey there are big opportunities and big risks here; economists need to be working on this, thinking about this, and coming up with some policy designs."
Let me provide a banal example rather than an AI 2040-style example so that folks don't get too fired up. Existing academic institutions like peer review and grant applications are facing a very large shock from AI in the next couple of years. These institutions are imperfect but they are intended to serve certain goals. The incoming shock is large enough that we need to model this and we need to start experimenting with alternative institutional arrangements, if only on a small scale. The time to work on this is before the system breaks down, not after. Maybe the system won't break down and we will look silly for worrying, but I wouldn't put my money on that.
See what happens then regulate the downside is the 'scientific' approach. But perhaps this is an example of campaigning in poetry. So more of a political intervention, saying we're watching and are prepared to act if business does harmful stuff which it (and its lobbyists) then claim can't be undone, is a step backwards, an encroachment on freedom, not in the best interests of the country etc etc. 'We must act proportionally and at the appropriate time' doesn't grab the attention in quite the same way.
If Noah were running for office, then I would agree that refusing to sign a statement of this kind would be a bad call. Sadly, he in not running for office, though.